Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Build big scenic images from your small snapshots using this easy plugin for The GIMP.

Your Mileage May Vary

Obviously, Pandora can't cope well in every circumstance. Different amounts
of light between photos, particularly when your photos include sky or
water, make it difficult to create a consistent picture. This is most
notable when shooting toward the sun. Moving subjects, such as cars or
people, can result in the occurrence of ghosted images. Cityscapes containing a
lot of right angles can emerge imperfectly when the angle of each photo
is not perfect. Finally, if the source photos are not ideal, your
results won't be either. A fixed tripod or at least holding the camera
close to you with your elbows against your body gives a standard height
and angle that can make your photos much easier to line up. The better
your source photos, the less effort you need to use in making your
panoramas fantastic.

As with most things, you can find tutorials and hints on creating
panoramas on the Net. By
using Pandora, it's possible for a rank amateur to come up with some
great results, even with a limited knowledge of The GIMP and
layers. The
picture in Figure 4 shows a successful scene, where the sky and water tones
are consistent and the edges are lined up.

Figure 4. Sydney from Cremorne Point—water and
buildings are difficult, but the rewards are worth it.

Thanks for the instructions. I was able to use your steps to stitch a panorama photo. But couldn't do last step to get rid of jagged edges... I selecting image with rectangle tool as suggested, but was not able to copy to new image. I copied image, opened new image, and pasted but everything closed up! Can anyone help?

Thanks for the instructions. I was able to use your steps to stitch a panorama photo. But couldn't do last step to get rid of jagged edges... I selecting image with rectangle tool as suggested, but was not able to copy to new image. I copied image, opened new image, and pasted but everything closed up! Can anyone help?

Ha, if you want something really straghtforward and s u b s t a n t i a l l y more powerful than what was described in the article, I highly recommend http://xmerge.sourceforge.net.

While its X11 interface is very spartan, its efficiency more than compensates for. But where it shines is the feature set. It's the user who decides which image feature is common for two pictures to be merged and the tool is not only translating but rotating the images as well. You can save the set of merging hints and reload them later. Oh, and unlike pandora, it does merge x-y matrixes, not only uni-dimensional panoramas.

I stumbled upon it while looking for a stitiching program and xmerge was a big relief after trying pandora and some other complex tools whose names I don't recall right now. I successfuly merged imperfect pictures in a 16 X 8 matrix and it was something like a 10 minutes job.

It is good to publicize tools like this. The GIMP Plugin registry is good but without binaries it isn't all that useful for end users. It would be great if there were a packages with extra Gimp plugins
(gimp-plugins-extra?)

Pandora will provide a good counter point to the new PhotoMerge tool in Adobe Photoshop.
It is such a shame that there is so much great functionality for the GIMP that users dont even know about because it is hard to find and use.

What a great piece of software! I obtained the rpm release after installing gimptool and on my first attempt created a flawless panoramic view of my apartment; it only took about two minutes. Very impressive--thanks so much for the suggestion.